attract any attention – and I’ve won small prizes quite a few times, a lottery ticket or something. It’s like a job. The crosswords keep me busy from eight thirty to four in the afternoon. In the daytime I always keep the radio on. Always P1! The programmes I like are Tendens [‘Tendency’], Släktband [‘Family Ties’], Lunchekot [‘Midday News’], Vetandets värld [‘The World of Knowledge’] and Språket [‘Our Language’]. At six in the evening I retire to my room and after that I don’t want to be disturbed by anyone. Then the evening routines begin, and they are mainly about watching television. I go to bed at nine thirty. At ten o’clock I turn out the lights and go to sleep.’
It was exactly as I had suspected. Sture Bergwall had no contact with anyone outside the hospital. No one at all. Hardly even with his fellow patients.
‘Sture, you’ve confessed to a large number of murders. And you’ve been convicted for eight of them. Do you still stand by your confessions?’
Sture looked at me in silence, before answering.
‘The confessions stand firm. They do . . .’
There was a lull in the conversation while we let this decisive prerequisite for our meeting sink in. I looked at the mysterious man sitting before me.
Either he was the worst serial killer in northern Europe, or he was a mythomaniac who had duped the entire Swedish judicial system.
Nothing about the man gave me the slightest clue as to which alternative seemed most likely.
‘You’re living under rigorous security conditions,’ I said, trying to move things along. Sture listened attentively. ‘The clinic seems more or less escape-proof: steel doors, reinforced glass, alarms.’
He mumbled his agreement.
‘I’m wondering . . . What would happen if you were allowed to rejoin society?’
Now Sture was looking at me with incomprehension.
‘Would you fall back into criminality, start murdering and cutting up children again?’
His heavy gaze grew even sadder.
‘No, no, no!’
Slowly he shook his head, then stopped and sat there with his eyes looking down at his lap.
‘No, I wouldn’t.’
I didn’t give up.
‘So what would happen if you were allowed to live in society under supervision?’
‘The doctors believe that I need to be kept in psychiatric care—’
‘I know that,’ I interrupted. ‘I’ve read what they have to say about it. But now I’m asking you. You strike me as fairly normal. Reasonable.’
‘Yes?’ his voice rose in that characteristic way of his. He smiled and looked as if I had said something absurd. ‘Wasn’t I supposed to be?’ he added rhetorically.
‘No you weren’t! You’re regarded as Sweden’s most dangerous and craziest basket case. Haven’t you understood that?’
Sture didn’t seem to have taken offence, but the question remained unanswered: what would happen if Sture Bergwall were released?
The question was justified.
The man in front of me appeared to be sensitive and kind. It was difficult to merge one’s impression of him with that of the cruel, sadistic serial killer.
And what conclusions might I infer from that?
None at all, I thought.
The silence was broken by the care assistants from Ward 36 coming to take the serial killer back to his cell.
We said our farewells without agreeing to meet again.
UNCLE STURE
I SPENT THAT summer reading pre-trial investigation material and contacting a number of police who had worked on the Quick inquiries, Sture Bergwall’s family and friends, the families of the victims and the accomplices he had pointed out. The list was apparently endless. Many of them were welcoming and generous. For obvious reasons it proved difficult to establish a line of communication with the people responsible for the care of Thomas Quick at Säter Hospital. My expectations were close to zero when I telephoned Säter’s retired chief physician at home.
Göran Källberg was not enthused when he heard about my plans to make a documentary about Thomas Quick. I said that I didn’t want to discuss the question of guilt, but rather how the investigation and psychiatric care had been managed. As soon as he heard this, his tone softened considerably.
It was obvious that the Quick case was troubling Göran Källberg, but for reasons that were unclear. He was critical of prosecutor van der Kwast’s handling of the relationship with Säter Hospital. He was also self-critical with regard to certain elements in the psychiatric care.
‘In any case, patient confidentiality makes it impossible for me to discuss an individual patient,’ he explained.
I asked what his position would be if Sture Bergwall gave him authority to speak freely. He didn’t want to answer this, but he was prepared to think about it.
His ambivalence was obvious. Something was bothering him, something he very much wanted to talk about. But he struggled with it. I understood that this conversation had placed Göran Källberg in a dilemma of sorts.
‘I feel a great deal of loyalty to Säter psychiatric clinic and the people who work there,’ he said. ‘On the other hand, I don’t want to participate in the cover-up of a miscarriage of justice.’
What was he saying? A miscarriage of justice? I did my best to hide my excitement. So this was how the ex-chief physician of Säter Hospital regarded the case of Thomas Quick – as a miscarriage of justice.
Göran Källberg indicated that his concerns centred on the events around the time of Quick’s withdrawal, his ‘time out’. He told me that on his own initiative he had asked a couple of different judges about the possibilities of overturning the verdicts and demanding restitution for Quick. The answer he received was that in principle it would be impossible. He had no choice but to leave it there.
However much I thought about it I couldn’t imagine what it was that Källberg considered to be a possible reason for the conviction to be overturned.
One thing I have learned in my years as an investigative journalist is the importance of chronology: to clearly define the order in which things occurred, so that one can rule out incongruities – meaning certain things that couldn’t possibly have happened at the same time – and separate cause and effect.
By meticulously arranging the eyewitness accounts of the death of Osmo Vallo on a timeline, I was able to show that the police’s version of events was not credible. In the same way, accusations against the man convicted of incest in ‘The Case of Ulf’ were disproved by the simple fact that he was elsewhere at the time when he was supposedly assaulting his daughter. After the Gothenburg riots, by breaking things down into units of time – in
